Exploring the attraction of horror films

Thursday

Oct 29, 2009 at 12:01 AMOct 29, 2009 at 4:32 AM

“Horror really can be a social experience,” professor Jason Reiss said. That is just one of the observations Reiss and the students in his first-year seminar, “Psychology and Horror,” have made as they explore people’s attraction for horror films.

Donna Whitehead

The students sat alone in the dark watching the horror movie “Quarantine,” but somewhere during the film they no longer were alone. They were chatting and laughing together as the film got scarier and scarier.

“Horror really can be a social experience,” said professor Jason Reiss of Wheaton College in Norton.

That is just one of the observations Reiss and the students in his first-year seminar, “Psychology and Horror,” have made as they explore people’s attraction for horror films.

“I was watching the film with 15 students and started watching the students’ reaction rather than the film,” Reiss said. “First they are individually reacting to the film, then as it gets scarier the audience gets more relaxed, they start talking to each other and laughing. Instead of 15 individuals they are several small clusters.”

An assistant professor of psychology, Reiss was searching last spring for a topic that would interest his first-year seminar this fall and found himself intrigued by his own recent experience with horror films.

Though he likes movies and television, Reiss said he would not describe himself as a horror buff. Reiss has a 2-year-old who likes “SpongeBob SquarePants” and said he personally enjoys “Penguins of Madagascar,” but he found himself longing for a good horror flick. He saw advertisements for “My Bloody Valentine” and was intrigued.

“It felt like I’d been pulled to the Disney side so far I needed to come back to a darker side,” he said. “So I rented a whole bunch of horror films.”

Being a psychologist and a student of human nature, Reiss began wondering about that.

“I started thinking about psychological drives,” he says. “I started thinking about Freud, who is all about sex and aggression — as are horror films. Are horror films fulfilling needs that we can’t work out in the real world, because they’re not allowed? That’s very Freudian.”

So he found a rich subject for his seminar.

One of first things Reiss asked the class was, "What is horror?" There was no easy answer.

“For some it’s very personal,” Reiss said, such as a personal fear of snakes or spiders or in his case, sharks. “Some horror lives within the film.”

He said there are universal things that trigger fear such as the dark, a feeling of loss of control, a sense of being trapped and the innocent - such as a child or parent - turning evil.

Why do people like horror? Reiss speculated that horror films offer the chance to experience fear and danger without ever really being in peril.

The class also discussed how what frightens people changes with the times. The scary movies of the 1950s, such as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” depicted a loss of control and individuality and tapped into fear of communism. Today Reiss said you see many films tapping into fear of plague, such as in “Quarantine” and “28 Days.”

Throughout the semester, the class will continue to explore psychology through such horror gems as “Alien,” “Halloween” and “Night of the Living Dead.”

“I picked a topic that I wanted to learn about,” Reiss said. “I’m not an expert in horror, and I’m learning along with my students. I think they know that their ideas are just as legitimate as mine. We’re just exploring the terrain.”